The reason why it is fruitless to try to possess anything is because anything that is possessed, i.e. taken for one’s own, is removed from the stream, and deprived of its life. Of course, the very desire to possess is itself part of the stream—there is no escaping (the Tao). But there is a difference between the tension, and unhappiness, created by the constant belief in one’s ability to possess things and identifying, instead, with the Tao and seeing that this is impossible. It’s like the difference between one man knowing it is impossible to lift a house with his bare hands, and another man trying for hours on end to try to lift it. Neither man will lift the house, but the first man will be much happier, in a certain sense. But perhaps nature intends for some people to learn the hard way. There is certainly something to be said for learning things the hard way.
Anything that you think you possess, you are going to have to give up eventually.
Ideas are easily possessed—we are rarely taught growing up that everything we have ever been taught is more akin to a ferry, a vehicle, than a tenet or law. A vehicle can move, a law cannot. There are too many contexts and levels in the world for any idea or statement or belief to encompass the entire truth. And the world is always changing and moving, thus requiring the mobility of vehicles. Words are far, far too limited. When we travel to a foreign country for the first time, we ride an airplane along a route we have never taken before, and when we land, we exit the plane. We don’t stay in the plane or try to take it with us. And if we go somewhere else, we go through the same process. The “vehicles” of Buddhism are aptly named: Mahayana (big vehicle) and Hinayana (little vehicle). Certain forms of Buddhism, particularly Zen, understand that nothing, not even the most divinely inspired theology or philosophy, escapes the fact of being simply a vessel to take one from side of things to another side. When you reach the other side, you need to get out of the vessel. And getting out of the vessel does not mean renouncing everything you learned in that vessel—that would be the equivalent of sailing backwards. Leaving the vessel is simply recognizing that you need to be open, unfettered, in continuing the journey, not expecting for the boat you used to cross the river to be helpful in scaling the mountain ahead of you. How much more encumbered will you be dragging your boat across the field!
The process of unlearning is equally as important as the process of learning. And just as we need clothes and houses to shelter us from the world, we develop psychological clothes and shelters. And this is of course necessary. We are much more capable of movement, of exploration, when we have shelter to return to, to rest upon, to take refuge. Julian Marias points to this fact in his discussion of the origins of our word “problem.” He points to the Greek verb from which the word is derived, which refers to a “jutting out,” like a wall. He points out that a wall is not always necessarily a problem, or an obstacle. It is only an obstacle when one desires to go beyond it, when it is in someone’s path. A wall, Marias says, can also be a shelter. By extension we can say that any philosophical concept can be an obstacle to one person, and a shelter to another, depending on where they are and where they want to go. Going back to the necessity of learning and unlearning—sometimes we need to shed and release—concepts, beliefs, assumptions—in order to climb a mountain, and sometimes we need to stock up to travel to the Arctic.
“The use of analogy is like boiling an egg; if boiled too long it will explode. The important thing is to boil for just long enough—and then eat the egg.”
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